The first snowfall of the season ~ November 5, 1992

David Heiller

There’s something in the first snowfall of the season that brings out joy and wonder. You hear about it on the radio, and even the announcer’s voice is urgent, excited. You step outside and feel the wet, chilly air, see the low clouds, and you smile inside.

Then snow fills the air, and you know it’s going to last, and you want to curl up in a quilt, maybe grab a book and a cup of coffee, maybe grab a nap. Bears are thinking the same thing in the woods, with the first snowfall.

As snow coats the ground, the house fills up with a special light, soft and bright at the same time from all that whiteness outside reflecting in. Thoughts from childhood come back like they do every year. The excitement of snow. The anticipation of sledding, of making snowmen, of missing school, of seeing Mother Nature change her clothes before your very eyes.

You notice the dog lying in front of the woodstove, her coat thick and glossy, and with the snow falling outside, you are happy to see the dog there. She belongs in that spot.

Noah and Dan and a rousing game of Monopoly.

You break out the Monopoly game at the kitchen table, and play with the kids. Monopoly was meant to be played on a snowy Sunday afternoon.

You go outside to bring in wood for the woodstove. The wood feels good in your arms. You realize for the first time that all of the cuttίng and splitting and stacking has paid off. Oh, that white oak feels good when you carry it in! It will feel even better when it heats the house.

Outside, your senses are sharpened as snowflakes fly like sparks off a grinding wheel. You notice that the wind is from the northeast. You turn your collar against it, and hunch your shoulders. You turn your eyes to the dull skies and wonder if this storm will bring three inches or 33 inches. You never know about the first snow fall, and that makes it all the more exciting. Out in the woods, the coyotes and deer are doing the same thing, lifting their faces to the clouds, wondering at it all with animal instincts that we can’t understand except for this one.

Night falls. The cat crawls up on the couch and lies on the socks you are folding. That’s O.K. You smile, like she seems to smile, because the first snow is falling outside.

Wintery days

You go to bed and hear the creaking of the branches as they coat with snow. They scratch the house like bony fingers. The kettle of water on the woodstove boils over a drop. It hits with a hiss, and you look up at this unfamiliar sound.

In the morning, the snow is still falling. Four inches lie on the ground, heavy and wet like the first snowfall often is. The kids eat and dress and throw on their snowsuits for the first time in seven months. They rush outside, forgetting to wash their faces and brush their teeth. They quickly roll a big ball of snow, heavier than they are, and then another, and fetch their dad to lift it onto the bottom one, which he does with a groan and a smile. Those old childhood memories come back again.

THE FIRST SNOWFALL will soon pass. So will all these notions. Then the soft white light won’t be so special. The wood will feel heavy in your arms, and you’ll notice the mess it leaves around the woodbox. You’ll get used to the hissing woodstove, and won’t hear the trees outside at night. Your eyes won’t turn to the sky with the same sense of wonder, and you might even cuss a spell when the roads pile up with more wet, slippery snow.

But not yet, not until you welcome with joy the first snowfall.

Single parenting: a learning experience ~ November 9, 1995

David Heiller

I’m a single dad these days. My wife, Cindy, has gone away to help her mom recover from cancer surgery.

Her absence makes me appreciate many things.

David and I were partners, which made my many weeks away from my family so very
hard. Funny, there are really no photos from that fall. 
We all survived with lots of love and understanding. Well, maybe not the house!

When I think about how hard it is being a single parent, I think back to my own childhood. My dad died four months before I was born, so Mom raised us eight kids by herself and with the help of her mother, who lived upstairs.

I can’t get Mom to reminisce about those good old days much, maybe because they weren’t so good. But when she does, she always mentions how Grandma was there to help, how she couldn’t have done it without her.

Lately I’ve been thinking about Cindy in the similar manner. I couldn’t do this single parent thing very well.

Our family life has evolved into certain patterns, and those patterns are all askew now. For example, Cindy supervises the kids’ homework, and now I’m doing that. It’s a lot of work, but I like it.

It’s a good time to sit face to face with the kids and go over any problems they are having in math, or to help them review social studies for a test. We often talk about other things at that time too.

Cindy makes them practice their instruments, and I’m doing that. Well, some of the time. I don’t always remind them to practice, and they don’t remind me to remind them, although Noah did remind me to remind Mollie to prac­tice her piano. Funny, he didn’t remind me to remind him to practice his trombone.

I’m now in charge of rousting them up in the morning at 6:15, and making breakfast and seeing that their teeth and hair are brushed, their faces washed (and is Mollie’s hair dirty?), and making sure their school bags are packed without any forgotten gloves or books, and making them cold lunch if they want it, and getting them on the bus at 7:15. Whew. It’s tiring just thinking about it.

I’m in charge of cleaning, which has suffered the most. I’m getting a glimpse of what our house would look like if I wasn’t married. It isn’t pretty. I call it the Norwegian Bachelor Farmer look. Everything appears all right, if you aren’t wearing your glasses. On closer look… Well, don’t take a closer look.

I’m in charge of supper, of which I can prepare one meal: eggs and potatoes and onions all mixed together in a frying pan with a pound of butter. I raided the garden one night for brussel sprouts. That was a big improvement. Yeah right, Dad.

Fortunately for the kids, and for me, people have sensed my dire cooking straits and sent home some fabulous food, like soup and spaghetti and tapioca pudding and meatloaf and bread and rolls and coffee cake and banana bread and cookies.

You see a lot of kindness in emergencies like ours. One friend even sent a note from her winter home in Arizona. “If I were home, I’d have cooked some fattening thing for Dave to take home for supper,” she wrote. “Thank you for sharing your sad news, giving people like me (us) an opportunity to pass on some of the kind­ness shown us in the past.”

That kindness is much appreciated.

Family photo.

The kids have taken on more responsibility in Cindy’s absence. Chores that Cindy and I might have done before, like washing dishes or vacuuming or folding laundry, they are now being asked to do, and they aren’t complaining about it. They know there are only 24 hours in a day, and that I can’t do it all. They know their grandma is sick, and that their mother is gone, because they miss her very much.

As do I. Cindy and I call each other two or three times a day, just to check in. I’m not much of a phone talker. The silences that come in a normal conversation don’t translate well for me over the phone. But it’s different talking to Cindy.

We tell each other about our days, about something the kids said, some incident from work, or how the tractor worked in the woods. It’s idle conversation that we might normally have over a game of Scrabble, or while riding to work together. But now nothing is normal, so we chat on the phone.

I’ve got a hunch that things will return to their old routines soon enough. Cindy will be heading home this week, I hope. In the meantime, it’s been a learning experience for everyone, and a time to appreciate what we often take for granted.

When Tooth Fairies call ~ November 8, 1990

David Heiller

The Tooth Fairy has been visiting our house lately, and the kids are laughing all the way to the piggy bank.

Malika and Noah are all grown up now and
they carved these two pumpkins.
 But gosh, they do LOOK familiar!

Their smiles have enough gaps to serve as models for pumpkin carvers, but they don’t care about that. They’re getting richer by the tooth.

I heard one mother telling about her son a while back that he wanted to pretend to put a tooth under the pillow every night, so their family could have lots of money. She had to laugh and explain in child language that life isn’t that easy.

At first Noah and Mollie looked at a loose tooth as a red badge of courage. They would work them for days, sometimes weeks, like they were playing an eight pound lake trout in the Boundary Waters. They would twist and wiggle, push and pull at the tooth, until nothing but a thread seemed to be holding it.

Then Mom and Dad would be invited to try. That’s a rare privilege, when you think about it: Would YOU let someone put his fingers in your mouth to wiggle a tooth?

Noah asked me for help on his first loose tooth a few months ago, while Cindy was napping in the bedroom. My approach had shades of the Dark Ages, or at least the depths of the 1950s. I took some thread from the junk drawer, intending to tie one end to the tooth, and the other to a doorknob. My brother Glenn worked this on me successfully when I was about six. I could never figure out why he laughed so gleefully as he slammed the door shut and my tooth came shooting out of my mouth. I didn’t laugh, but I did trust my big brother.

Luckily for Noah, I couldn’t get a good knot on his tooth. So I got the Vice Grips out of the tool drawer. “Are you SURE that will work?” Noah asked, a worried look on his face. His trust was wavering. “Sure,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound so sure. But Glenn had used pliers on me; surely a Vice Grips was a step forward.

Luckily again for Noah, Cindy heard this conversation, and sensed with mother instinct that Dad was in over his head. So she called him in to the bed, and after about 10 minutes of wiggling, had a tiny tooth to show for her patience.

Since then, both Noah and Mollie have learned how to pull a tooth out on their own. It’s no big deal any more. We’ll be sitting around the living room, and all of a sudden, Mollie will give a happy yell and, bloody but unbowed, show us a little tooth.

Then there’s question of payment. Some of you old-timers will no doubt remember when you got a penny for a lost tooth from the Tooth Fairy. But when Noah’s friend, Joey, informed Noah that he got a DOLLAR for his tooth, I couldn’t help but give his dad a dirty look.

I got a dime for my last lost tooth, way back when. I was thinking maybe a quarter now, what with cost-of-dental increases and all. But with Joey’s free-spending-liberal Tooth Fairy looming, ours had to come up at least another quarter. So we settled on 50 cents.

I shouldn’t complain, because once all the permanent teeth are in, you don’t get a second chance. The next time they come out, it’s against our will. They stay out. And we pay the Tooth Fairy back in spades with every trip to the dentist. Fifty cents seems like a real bargain in comparison.

And those four-bit sojourns on tip-toe to the bedroom aren’t so bad. You reach under the pillow, find a Kleenex folded carefully around a tiny bit of tooth, so small you almost lose it. Then you slip a couple coins in the Kleenex and put it back under the pillow. You can’t help but smile and gaze for a moment at the sleeping beauty, no-teeth-and-all, having complete trust in some one as ephemeral as the Tooth Fairy.

Yeah, it’s just the Tooth Fairy. But when was the last time you had complete trust in anything? Probably back about that age. And in the morning, to see their glee at finding the money, just like they knew they would...

Come to think of it, that Tooth Fairy is worth every penny.

~After David died, the little container of little teeth was in his top dresser drawer.~chg

A little terror from a big brother ~ October 26, 1988

David Heiller

When was the last time you heard a scary story?

How about the latest presidential poll? (Just kidding, George.)

This newspaper recently ran a contest, soliciting scary stories from readers. We’ve got some good ones, and have printed several of the best on page seven in this edition. I hope you enjoy them.

The Heiller boys, before they started 
telling little brother, David, horror stories

I may be mistaken, but the best horror stories come from the minds of kids. As a member of the generation that grew up before axe-murder movies, I confess: I haven’t seen Friday the Thirteeth Part One yet, let alone Part Seven. And this Freddie guy doesn’t scare me—when I see those stainless steel finger nails, I think what a great job he could do working up our garden next spring. Wouldn’t even have to borrow a tiller. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre guy would be too tired for people after he finished cutting up the four-and-a-half cords of wood I bought from my neighbor last Saturday.

Yet 20 years ago, Lon Chaney would scare me for days if I sat up to watch him turn into a werewolf on Saturday night. Maybe it was staying up late that one night a week that did it. Maybe it was Earl Hinton. Maybe it was my brothers, who threatened to switch beds after I fell asleep and put me into Danny’s bed, the single bed—alone!—instead of the double bed where I slept with Glenn. (Glenn was nine years older than me, and always made me sleep next to the wall, but I didn’t mind after watching Lon Chaney turn into a werewolf.)

Back then, everybody knew a scary story or two. We took turns telling them at night at the school grounds. I think those stories had today’s butcher movies beat hands down. Danny had one of the best—or worst. I’ll share it here, with a warning—it came from the mind of a 12-year-old boy in 1962. Faint of heart and lovers of cats, stop reading now.

The story featured Danny (of course), and an old man, maybe Freddie’s grandfather. “This guy had only one good arm,” Danny would tell in an eager voice beneath the yellow streetlight at the school grounds. “The other he had lost in an accident. But for his other arm, the one that was missing, he bought a sickle attachment.”

“Where’d he get it, at the hardware store?” some older kid would crack. Danny ignored that, boring in on the younger kids with his quick eyes.

“And he didn’t use it to weed around the garden. He lived in this deserted house in the woods. One night a group of us got lost in the woods, and we came onto this house, see. A single kerosene lantern was all that shined through the windows.

“We crept up to a window, and slowly raised up to peek over the sill and into the room. Then we heard this noise—putt-ssss, putt-ssss, putt-ssss. Danny had this noise mastered from countless tellings, the sound of liquid dripping onto a hot surface. “Putt-ssss, putt-ssss.”

“It was dark in the room, so we leaned closer against the window. We could see something dripping onto the glass of the lantern. It was dripping from the ceiling above the room. Putt-ssss, putt-ssss.

“We didn’t know what to do, so I thought, “Well, I’m going to see what’s upstairs.” So I climbed in through the window, and there was a stairway in the corner, a steep stairway that went almost straight up. I could see a dim light there. So up I went, trying not to make a sound. I got_, to the top, and looked over.

“There, in a corner above the lantern we had seen downstairs, a man sat with his back to me. There was a gunny sack next to the man, and I could hear a strange noise. It was hard to figure at first, but then I recognized it, the sound of cats meowing all together, kind of crying and howling and moaning. Then this guy reached into the bag, and he pulled out a cat with his left hand, and he raised his right hand into the air, but he didn’t have a hand there at all. He had a sickle. And swoosh, that sickle sliced the air, and chopped that cat’s head off, and he raised it to his lips, and drank the blood, and tossed it in the corner. He was sitting in a pool of blood, so much that it was dripping through the floor, onto the lantern below, putt-ssss, putt-ssss.”

By this time, I couldn’t breath. Danny would manage a grin, a sneer that Lon Chaney would have envied. “Then I moved my foot, and the stairs creaked. That old man turned around and spotted me. He raised his right arm in the air, and jumped to his feet, blood dripping from the sickle. I couldn’t move. He charged, and then I turned and ran, we all ran, and we didn’t stop running, we ran for hours it seemed, always looking back, and seeing something behind us, we didn’t know what. We finally made it back to town, and we never saw that house or that old man again.”

About that time, someone would give a whoop. We would all jump and laugh. Mom would call from down the street. The story would be over, that night’s version anyway, forgotten but certain to be told again, passed down with the same chilling effect, until I had heard it enough times to scare the younger kids too.

I don’t think I’d ever repeat that story again today though. Certainly not in a weekly newspaper. Too tame. Better stick to Friday the Thirteenth and Halloween.

There’s nothing finer than music ~ October 13, 1994

David Heiller

My son came home from school two weeks ago with a trombone. I felt like the man who watched his mother-in. law drive off a cliff in his new Cadillac. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

On the one hand, Cindy and I want our children to take up an instrument. It’s good to learn tο read music. It’s a good school activity. He’ll get in with a good bunch of kids. Music is just plain good.

Malika sent me this photo as a homemade
postcard. (A trick she learned from her Daddy.) 
She and David loved to perform 
together both in public and in the kitchen.
They didn't play together nearly enough, though.

But a trombone? By an 11-year-old? In a small house, where lives a man who can hear stairs creak at 50 paces?

We tested it out on Friday night. I was playing the banjo in the kitchen, which is the best room in the world for any musical instrument.

Noah and our daughter, Malika, were playing with puzzles in the living room. They weren’t fighting (for a change), so I risked upsetting that fragile ecosystem by bringing out the banjo.

Now the banjo isn’t exactly the quietest instrument. That’s one reason I can’t get too righteous about the trombone. But when the urge hits me to play music, I play.

And darned if that trombone didn’t sound good. Noah was able to follow the tunes with his trombone, at least to dad’s Dumbo-like ears. Maybe beauty is in the ear of the beholder.

There’s nothing finer than playing music with your family. Here’s hoping for the best for boy and trombone. But even if that match doesn’t work out, it’s not the end of the line for Noah and music.

Music is what you make of it. I didn’t play an instrument in high school. I can’t read music. But I love to play and sing. If it brings you joy, that’s all you can ask. If it brings others joy, that’s a bonus.

ONE OF MY FAVORITE musicians is Red Hansen. He plays the piano accordion, and sometimes I play with him. We usually need an excuse to do this, like the Askov Fair Variety Show or an open house at the Askov American (this Friday from 9-noon).

Red and David at the
Askov American office, 1994.

Then we practice. I drive out to his house. Sometime’s he’s sitting in his porch, playing when I arrive. There’s nothing finer than the sound of homemade music drifting off a front porch.

Some of the songs we both know, like Amazing Grace or Grandfather’s Clock. Then Red will play something new. New to me that is. He’ll say, “You know that one, don’t you Dave?”

I’m always tempted to say, “Oh yeah, that one.” I should know it, but I was born 50 years too late. And I don’t dare lie, because then I’ll have to play it.

Red and David's last public appearance was at the Community Theatre in Barnum. Cynthia Johnson was presenting a series of Scandinavian folk tales. David played the button-box for one of them. He and Red played old Danish tunes before the opening curtain. They were a hit!

So I’ll say, “Νο, I don’t” in a sheepish voice, and Red will play, “Believe Me of All Those Endearing Young Charms,” and teach me a new song. There’s nothing finer than learning a new song with Red Hansen.

Sometimes even Red will get stuck on a song. He won’t remember its title, or how it goes. He’ll slap his head and say, “Come on, Hansen.” That makes me feel better. He’s forgotten more songs than I’ll ever know.

AND THERE’S NOTHING finer than a good live musical concert. I’ve been reminded of that twice in the last month and a half. The first time came when Dave Ray and Tony Glover played at Gampers in Moose Lake.

Tony autographed a harmonica book of his that I had bought back in 1975 or so. What a thrill to meet him and hear him play. And listening to Dave Ray play his guitar and sing was spellbinding. He sang and sweated through his shirt and through the night.

Their music took me back to my childhood, when my brother would bring Kohner, Ray, and Glover records home from college. And here they were, 30 years later, still playing to small crowds in a coffeehouse.

Stuart Davis played at Gampers last Sunday. His guitar sparkled too, and his original words twisted and turned in every fresh, original direction you could imagine. He’s a fantastic young musician from Minnesota.

When we clapped and clapped for an encore, he did three more songs. He didn’t want to stop. We didn’t want him to either.

…There’s nothing finer.

Thank you, Mr. Stark ~ October 19, 2005

David Heiller

It was interesting visiting with Bob Stark last week. Or should I say Mr. Stark, That’s how I always thought of him at Caledonia High School.

I went to his house on October 13 and took a picture of him with an award he received from Winona State University.

Mr. Stark (old habits die hard) told me how much he liked my writing. He recalled my mother—she had red hair right?—back when my brother Glenn first signed up for football, probably in 1957. He reminisced about Johnny Winslow. He talked about how much he loves Caledonia, how good the city has been to him. 

Mr. Stark, from the 1971 yearbook
(Thank you for sending 
me this, Jane Palen)

I left with a hearty handshake and a pat on the back. “You take care!” he said. I felt like charging out of the house and onto a football field.

That’s the kind of guy Mr. Stark is, and was.

Allow me three trips down memory lane. I remember at the end of eighth grade, my first year at CHS, I told some friends that I wasn’t going to go out for football the next year. Mr. Stark was the football coach then. He tracked me down. It was in the gymnasium. I can remember where I was standing. He put his arm around my shoulder and asked if it was true, that I wasn’t going out for football in the fall.

I answered somewhat hesitantly. This was the head football coach talking to a measly eighth grader. I said yes, it was true, I wanted to go fishing and hunting instead. He told me that he thought I was a good football player, that I could help the team, be a part of the future. Then he said what I was doing was OK. I think he looked in my eyes and saw that that’s what I wanted to do, That’s what he wanted to see.

A couple years later I was standing in line outside the gymnasium—I remember the very spot—with other football players (I had returned to the fold.) We were all getting a mass physical. It must have been August of 1969. Mr. Stark came up to me again and put his arm around my shoulder and said he was sorry to hear that my sister Lynette had died. I was totally unprepared for the comment. A wave of grief came boiling out of those hidden places. I tried hard and failed to hold back the tears that I thought had dried up a month earlier. Guys around me looked away or down at the floor. It was a powerful moment, very emotional. I felt embarrassed and a little angry at the time. But it was one of those little things that really helped me process my sister’s death. Somehow knowing that good old Mr. Stark knew enough about me to say he was sorry really helped.

Then there was the time when he knocked on Miss Tweeten’s English class door—I remember the exact classroom—and asked to talk to me. There was a father-son banquet in town. Mr. Stark knew I didn’t have a dad. There was a good speaker I would like. Would I be interested in going with him?

I said no. Hey, teenagers do dumb things, and that registers right up there. But in a way it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he asked; he thought about me, he cared. That is a good teacher, and a good person.

So it was good to see Mr. Stark again last week after 34 years. Good to feel that handshake and slap on the back. Caledonia maybe has been good to him, like he said, but he’s been even better for Caledonia, and for all of us.

Remembering Mother Nature’s best friend ~ November 2, 1989

David Heiller

The porch at Bob Eikum’s house in Moose Lake always seemed special to me. It had no lights, no heater, no glass to cover the screens and keep the cold out. Bob and his wife, Boots, had planned it that way. The better to view Mother Nature, to let her come into your life.

Bob Eikum, Mother Nature
and David's friend.

Mother Nature came into that porch a lot, sometimes with a house full of people at an Eikum potluck, sometimes alone. Even at the end, cold and raw in September, she came to settle on Bob as he sat in a wheelchair one last time, soaking it up on his porch.

Nature was Bob Eikum’s life, from the time he grew up in Mankato, while he studied forestry at the University of Minnesota, when he worked as a forester in Alabama and Florida and Tennessee, as a Boy Scout leader, every job he worked, he worked with nature.

When he retired and moved to Moose Lake with Boots in 1978, he worked with nature as a photographer and as what he called an environmental consultant. He could just as well have called himself an environmental protector, but that would have been too grand for Bob. He never talked about his accomplishments. I was surprised one day to see his office wall covered with awards from past jobs. He was too busy working on something new to brag about the past.

Many awards came from conservation groups in Florida, where he had fought with developers in wealthy Volusia County. That’s where the ground opens up every so often and swallows someone’s Ferrari. I remember one time, eating breakfast with Bob at Chef’s Cafe in Moose Lake, how his eyes shined when he saw a picture in the paper of a car sticking out of a Florida sink hole. He thought it was poetic justice. He didn’t have to say, “I told you so,” because he HAD told them so.

Bob found a few different kinds of sink holes in Minnesota too, or maybe they found him. Like in 1980 when people were interested in mining uranium in Carlton County, Bob helped organize FORE, Folks Organized for Responsible Energy, a grass-roots group that turned into the Minnesota Coalition on Uranium. He helped people see the nonsense in uranium mining around here.

Bob could smell nonsense from a good distance, like the plan to subdivide the Log Drive Creek area west of Askov. Bob joined with other people to testify against this would-be atrocity. He researched it, wrote about it in newspaper columns, spoke out about it, made phone calls. He didn’t stop it single-handedly, but he was always there, someone you could call day or night someone who could answer your questions, someone who would defend you, if you were defending nature.

Boots was his partner in these things, though they took different approaches. Bob would attack a problem in a soft-spoken, academic way. Boots showed more fire. I remember one time after a public hearing in Hinckley, we were sitting around a table at Tobies. I asked Boots what she thought of the land developer’s arguments. “I wanted to slap his face,” Boots replied in her Alabama drawl. I smiled and thought, “If the developer could hear her, he would save himself a lot of time and trash his stupid plans on the spot.” How could he win against a one-two punch like Bob and Boots?

Not all his causes were popular. The fight over pine trees in the Moose Lake School parking lot seemed frivolous to a lot of people, but not Bob. Cutting down one tree needlessly, especially a 100-year-old Norway, was pretty serious. And I remember how mad he became when National Wildlife Federation President Jay Hare met with President Ronald Reagan, who Bob thought hurt the environment tremendously. That was like meeting with the enemy. There was little room for compromise in such matters with Bob. I always took heart in his stubbornness, even when I disagreed. He was someone you could count on, a constant in a world of vacillators.

Bob wrote a column for the Askov American called Minnesota Outdoors. I don’t think writing came easy for him, and he sure didn’t write for the money, because we could never afford to pay him a dime. I suspect he did it because it was one more way for him to share nature, to tell about wild flowers, or the North Shore, or edible plants, or recycling. His pictures were marvelous. The newspaper could never capture their color and beauty.

A bitter person might say that Nature played a trick on Bob, because he suffered from poor health, especially in his later years when he should have been enjoying life. Diabetes literally knocked him flat, until he was bound to a wheel chair, until he asked to leave his beloved porch and go into a nursing home.

Yes, maybe Bob should have lived longer than his 68 years. Maybe he should have died on his porch, or on his bog east of Moose Lake under the stars of a cold winter night, like Sigurd Olson. But when you think of what Bob left behind, you realize he lived at least long enough to teach us all a lesson or two, some through his words and pictures, the rest through his best friends, the pines and rocks, the water and earth, his Minnesota Outdoors.